The Keeper's Random Ramblings - Faience dinner service

These are French made, slip cast tin glazed plates with lively hand painted designs of fruit and vegetables.  It is a charming service with a Mediterranean feel and probably used for informal lunches at the Haywards Port Willunga beach house

The Haywards Port Willunga beach house

Carrick Hill’s Hayward Bequest is what is called a closed collection and is not normally the subject of acquisition except under exceptional circumstances, as in this case.  The were three plates from the set in the ‘vault’ (the underground room where all the silver, china and ornaments surplus to use are stored) so imagine our delight when a call from Small &Whitfields Auctions informed us of 47 pieces were being sold from the private collection of one of Adelaide’s leading antique dealers who had recently died. 
The Friends of Carrick Hill agreed to finance the purchase of the missing ceramics and I successfully bid for the lot to bring home this wonderfully rustic dinner service.  Research is still being carried out into exactly who the French manufacturer is - their mark is clearly on the reverse of every piece.

Makers mark on the reverse of the recovered Faience dinner service.

A quiet word from the List Mistress - William de Morgan lustre ware bowl

Collection of the Carrick Hill Trust, Adelaide; Haywood Bequest.

Accession No: C1983/436

This large gleaming lustre ware bowl catches my eye every time I walk into the Music Room where it usually sits centre stage on a carved Georgian oak pedestal side table 

Although this bowl is not physically marked it is unmistakably the design style of William de Morgan (1839-1917) one of the great practitioners of the English Arts and Crafts movement.  William de Morgan was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and a personal friend of William Morris and he began working for Morris as a designer and painter not long after the establishment of the Morris & Co. company in the 1860s.  William de Morgan is mainly known for his wonderfully bold and dynamic ceramic designs, in particular hand painted tiles, but he was as a designer of stained glass and a painter of furniture panels.   

I find it interesting to reflect on the fact that Ursula Hayward’s paternal grandmother, Joanna Barr Smith had furnished her large family homes almost exclusively with Morris textiles – carpets, curtains, embroideries plus wallpapers and other decorative arts objects.  Many of these items are now in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia and the young Ursula would have been familiar with the look of the many Arts and Crafts style objects that would have been on display in these houses.   

William de Morgan is credited as being the first of the English potters to rediscover the secrets of antique lustre effects but he was a primarily a designer and decorator rather than a hands-on potter so the undecorated bowl may have been actually been produced as a blank by another factory.  The earthenware body is covered with a beautiful ruby lustre glaze on an ivory ground and features a frieze of 5 large seated boars surrounded by de Morgan’s typically stylized leaf and floral motifs, the inside of the bowl is undecorated.  This bowl may have been decorated and fired at the Sands End Pottery at Fulham, London that de Morgan had moved to in 1888 or perhaps this was done at one of the other top art potteries that abounded in the area at that time.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has a large covered vase worked in a similar style however their vase is rather more exotic than this one as it features an all-over design of bold, sinuous mythical beasts and  stylized foliage.  

link to blog: http://victorianpeeper.blogspot.com.au/2007/07/victorian-things-vase-by-william-de.html

References:

The William de Morgan Foundation, London http://www.demorgan.org.uk/collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art   http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/23.163.2ab

British Pottery: An Illustrated Guide by Geoffrey A Godden pub. Barrie & Jenkins Ltd, London, 1974 p.223-226

A quiet word from the List Mistress - Redoute Rose

Pierre-Joseph REDOUTE  (1759-1840), Weeping Rose, watercolour and pencil on parchment, mounted on paper.  Carrick Hill Trust, Adelaide, Haywood Bequest

 You may not know his name, but chances are you have seen his work as it is now mass produced and appears on decorator items around the world.  It is to be seen on millions of greeting cards,  decorates your daily tea or coffee cup, or hangs as a print or poster on your walls - you might even use these images as your computer screen saver. 

I am talking about the exquisitely drawn images of old roses that are the work of the Belgian born artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté, (1759-1840).  Most people consider him a French artist but he was actually born into a family of painters and decorators who lived in a little village in the forest of the Belgian Ardennes.  Pierre-Joseph’s unique artistic talents took him to the very height of the 19^th century French court where he became attached to the circle that surrounded the Empress Josephine and the court of Emperor Napoleon.  Over a period of fifty years he became one of  the world’s greatest botanical artists and although he is now more commonly known as the ‘man who painted roses’ he actually painted all types flowers and his meticulous studies of primula, iris and lilies are all just as detailed and beautiful as his more familiar ‘old’ roses. 

Redouté also produced some of the earliest known botanical studies of the then strange, and newly discovered, Australian flora that Empress Josephine grew in her extensive gardens at Malmaison on the  outskirts of Paris in the early 1800s and some of these exotic antipodean plants were actually grown in France many years before they appeared in English gardens.  During his lifetime, Redouté’s drawings were published as hand-coloured engravings in expensive, limited edition publications and it was not until the later years of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries that his work became more widely available to the general population as cheaper, mass produced prints.

Carrick Hill has a small but significant collection of French paintings that includes this delicate original watercolour by Redouté.  It was acquired by Lady Ursula Hayward and as far as we know, is the only original work by this artist in an Australian collection.  Little is known about this painting except that it was painted for Redoute's friend, the French novelist and playwright, Honoré de Balzac.

The rose, still with a droplet of early morning dew on its petals is a 'cabbage' or Centifolia rose called Grand Choux Hollandais, originally grown, as the name suggests, in Holland.  The accompanying blue-violet auricular primula is equally beautiful and, at that time was just as exotic and desirable a plant to grow to demonstrate wealth and privilege.   

References:  The Man Who Painted by Roses: the story of Pierre-Joseph Redouté by Antonia Ridge,  pub., Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1974.

Napoleon, the Empress and the Artist: the story of Napoleon, Josephine’s garden at Malmaison, Redouté & the Australian Plants by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, pub., Kangaroo Press, Australia, 1999